Pages

Political Myth Busting

The objective of this Political Myth Busting series is to demolish some of the facile and often completely counter-factual myths that get used over and again.

If you follow politics at all, or you've ever picked up a tabloid newspaper, you'll be familiar with some of the most egregious examples such as the "Labour caused the financial crisis" lie, "the unemployed are all lazy scroungers" narrative, the "private is always more efficient than public" fallacy and the ludicrous "trickle down" theory of economics.

In order to skip to the most recent article in the seriesclick hereIf you're not in a hurry, please take a few minutes to read the following explanation of what the "Political Myth Busting" series is all about.

The problem is that (often absurdly inaccurate) political fallacies are far more pervasive than most people think. The reason that they are so pervasive is that they are usually based in the form of simplistic justification narratives. In brief, the use of the justification narrative technique is a propaganda methodology based on the concept that simple narrative structures (stories) are much more effective tools for spreading ideas than reams of statistics and rigorous analysis. In essence it is the idea that it doesn't matter how weak your own evidence is, or how brilliant your opponents' facts and analysis are, you'll win the debate in the mind of "the man on the street"as long as you're the better story-teller.

The use uf simplistic justification narratives to sell the right-wing neoliberal ideology relies upon the fact that the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom are functional illiterates in economic terms. There are many reasons for this, the main one being that basic economics is just not taught at all in the vast majority of state schools. Since 93% of British kids attend state schools, the vast majority of kids end up leaving school and entering the work environment as functional economic illiterates. (I'll leave it to you to form your own opinion about whether this failure to provide a basic economic education to the vast majority of people is a deliberate ploy by the establishment or not).

I really don't want to come across as mean, smug or superior when
I describe the majority of people as economic illiterates, but it happens to be true. I always thought of myself as
very intelligent and well informed, but it wasn't until I began actively
studying economics in my late 20s that I realised that I'd been living
with an distorted ad-hoc understanding of economic issues, despite being an
intelligent university graduate with a high IQ, I too had been suffering from basic economic illiteracy.

Now most people don't like to think of themselves as ignorant or illiterate (I certainly wouldn't have easily accepted the accusation when I was in my mid-20s) and this is where right-wing justification narratives come in. If a person that knows very little about the actual structure of the economy is presented with a simple and concise narrative that seems to explain a particular economic trend, they are likely to accept it at face value. People don't want to feel that they are ignorant or economically illiterate and these right-wing narratives give them a nice simple framework in which they can create the illusion that they actually understand the economy.

The reality is that most people just don't understand the economy properly because most people don't even understand some of the really fundamental ideas, without which economic literacy is impossible. Without knowing the answer to the majority of the following questions, obtaining a nuanced and reasonably accurate understanding of the modern post-credit crunch economy would be absolutely impossible.

I can tell you now that significantly less than 5% of the UK population could give adequate answers to four of the preceding questions, let alone all ten of them. However without understanding at least the majority of these concepts the individual is never going to have a reasonable accurate or nuanced understanding of fundamentally important issues like what actually caused of the 2007-08 neoliberal economic meltdown, who is winning "the race to the bottom", the size and structure of the financial sector "shadow economy", consolodated depreciation ortaxation asymmetry.

The problem of course is that "the economy" is important to a lot of people. Polls and surveys show that "the economy" comes out as the number one priority when the public are asked about which area of public policy is most important to them.That the majority of people demonstrably don't understand the economic basics, yet they feel that good management of the economy is the most vital function of government tells us that people have the capacity to fill in the gaps in their knowledge to create a framework by which they grasp complex economic issues. The right-wing justification narrative is designed to fill in these gaps in the public consciousness with the right kind of stories to make people support economic ideas that go against their own best interests. Within a limited frame of understanding these justification narratives for extremist right-wing economic policies make sense, however the greater the level of economic literacy the individual attains, the less likely they are to be taken in by simplistic and misleading right-wing propaganda stories.Now consider that the right-wing press have been peddling these simplistic economic myths for decades, over and over and over again. These myths have become so well established that they are taken at face value, not only by traditionally conservative thinkers, but relied upon as fact by supposedly left-wing politicians of the Labour party and printed, without a hint of critical analysis, in supposedly left-wing publications like the Guardian newspaper.It doesn't matter that these simplistic naratives are economically incoherent, the majority of the population don't have the training to carefully deconstruct these right-wing stories from an economic perspective. It's like the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said:

"if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it"

And these justification narratives, which are used in order to justify the implementation of ideologically driven neoliberal pseudo-economic policies,have been repeated so often that they have actually worked their way into "common sense". If you pick them apart, so many of these right-wing narratives are based on scant evidence, or even rely on complete reversals of reality. However, the fact that they are widely held to be self-evident by so many people makes them appear as if they are "common sense".

One of the biggest problems in confronting these right-wing myths is that people actually become fond of their simplistic narratives. They are fond of them because they allow them to maintain the illusion that they are not fundamentally ignorant about economics. It is easy to understand how someone prefers to stick with the simple narrative that makes sense to them, rather than accept the counter-claim which is often complex and awfully difficult for them to even understand, because, economics, just like the economy itself, is in reality an awfully complex subject.

Another factor that allows the persistence of fallacious economic reasoning is the human tendency towards confirmation bias. In short, this is the perfectly natural tendency to favour arguments with which we agree and reject out-of-hand those with which we disagree. The human tendency to cherry-pick evidence and ignore or dismiss inconvenient data is one of the main reason that the fallacious reasoning and discreditied beliefs that underpin so many right-wing economic strategies persist on for decades and decades.The objective of the Political Myth Busting series is to, using relatively simple language, demolish some of these ludicrous right-wing myths that have wormed their way into the "common sense" worldview of so many millions of people.